Chatbots and the Future of Education in India with Apurva Muthe

Artificial intelligence, a powerful emerging technology sweeping business and society will drive the Next Economy and chatbots, aided by powerful natural language processors, are beginnig to make an impact across various industries; including education.

On this episode of the Big Bang Podcast I’m joined by Apurva Muthe, CEO & Founder of Tinker Bot. Currently, he studies Computer Science at Weber State University, Utah, USA. In the past he created Official Kumbhamela 2015 App for Nashik, India, which helped thousands of pilgrims from all over the world. Also, he created 4 other apps which are landing on Google Playstore. Also, he created a startup named Webdice which helped local business to expand their business online for cheapest rate which was a part of Digital India Initiative. Later, he secured patent for designing world’s most Portable Personal Computer.

Tinker Bot is an Artificial Intelligence based Chatbot geared towards redefining Indian Education System. Tinker Bot uses Facebook messenger as its main platform to teach learners and students by chatting with them. With the help of conversational chat forms, it creates an unique engagement with students and enhances one-to-one learning. Tinker Bot also tests the knowledge of user by asking various questions related to the topic and explains the answer if user selects the wrong answer.

Currently, Tinker Bot teaches General Knowledge spread across 8 categories and soon there will be many interesting out of the syllabus courses and board curriculums. Within 4 months of launch, there have been 28,000+ users and the user base is growing massively every day.

Below are some questions and our chat after that:

Apurva’s background;

What is your long-term vision for Tinker Bot?

What motivated you to create a chatbot for education? What did you notice was missing? And why do you believe a chatbot is the best way to achieve learning goals?

When you set out to build the chatbot, did you do user research before building it?

In their current form, what do you believe chatbots can do differently for learning / education and how do you see that evolving?

Tech companies don’t outright pitch it, but it seems to me that they’re out to create a version of Iron Man’s Jarvis. Is the concept of a personal learning assistant relevant to education? How so and how do you see this happening?

You’ve achieved some early success with Tinkerbot, what have you learned works for designing an engaging chatbot experience?

What are the limitations of chatbots and how do you overcome them?

In general, how do you see chatbots evolving over the next 5 years and what will drive their evolution?